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BLUEHOLME™ Prentice Rules: Spells Preview

Time is certainly getting on – it’s all stops pulled out here in order to ensure that Blueholme Prentice Rules and the Maze of Nuromen hit the virtual shelves in time for Christmas. So, as a little teaser, here is a preview of the spells chapter from the Prentice Rulebook!

Hi Joe – sorry for not updating on the progress. The BLUEHOLME Prentice Rules are finished and were, in fact, uploaded to DriveThru RPG before Christmas. Unfortunately, because this is Dreamscape Design’s first product it had to be cleared by DTRPG first. That has now happened, but the book is still showing up as inactive – I’m trying to get this issue resolved with DTRPG, unfortunately the holidays have slowed everything down.

Don’t worry, as soon as it goes live announcements will be made here and in all the usual places. Thanks for your interest!

Ah yes, I should have mentioned that! I’m using Preview on the Mac. Someone on Google+ told me that Adobe Pro on the Mac rendered the PDF correctly. Unfortunately, I don’t own Adobe Pro; just the standard Mac tools.

OK, so there are 2 issues causing the “blurred” or “pixelated” headers. First, it is in fact partly an issue of how the file was created. For whatever reason, the font used for section headings is not embedded into the PDF. Adobe Reader or Acrobat can handle this by simply applying the “closest available” font to the heading. If you open up the original document source and then open up your production PDF in Reader, you’ll notice that the fonts in the section headings are not quite identical. At any rate, older versions of Preview on Macs and portable iOS devices did not have the ability to substitute non-embedded fonts with a similar font, so we got “blocks” instead of text. The latest version of Mac OS solves this problem – I am able to see the PDF fine on my Mac in Preview. However, older versions, including my 1st generation iPad, will see the pixelated images instead of text in those section headings.

My recommendation is to use an embedded font for all text in the document. If you created the document in a modern version of MS Word, for example, make sure the option “Bitmap text when fonts may not be embedded” is NOT selected when using the Save As… PDF option (I’m not sure if this is how you created the document, just a suggestion). Here’s what that option looks like: http://i718.photobucket.com/albums/ww182/redwullf/saveaspdf_zps77307b02.png

I would also humbly like to ask that you fix the section heading fonts. There’ll be at least a few users of older Mac and iOS versions and it the issue is worth addressing. Speaking for myself, I can’t really use the PDF on my old iPad, which is where I do most of my PDF reading and use most often at the gaming table.